Collected Miscellany

BEIJING–Book City. Five floors, government owned. Population, 230,000 titles. Mike Meyer reports:

Book City is overwhelming. The din, the eager customers, the slippery stacks of oversized paperbacks — hardcovers are less common — whose covers call out: “I Was an American Police Officer,” “I’m Only Raising You for 18 Years” and “Chinese-Style Divorce.”

After a decade in China, I thought I’d seen it all: murder, jail, aliens, rodeo. But nothing prepared me for its publishing industry, in puberty.

Meyer says the printing and distribution of books is open to private industry in China, but the publishing part of it is solely state-run. That is, the Chinese communists try to reign in all publishing, but are currently tolerating private publishers who operate in something like organized crime rings in order to gain ISBNs for publishing a title.

San Luis Obispo County librarians have officially declared their intention to remove malodorous patrons if the stench is unbearable. Of course, some say this infringes on public rights, but I think those people don’t want to approach judging a person’s lifestyle choices, hang social decency. No doubt, the librarians will employ ample common sense. For instance, if I can’t breathe in your presence and you are not headed for the door, I will ask you to leg it.

THE difference between literature and its imitations might be defined in any number of ways, but let’s be reckless, even elitist, and propose that a literary novel requires new reading skills and teaches them within its pages, while a conventional novel — whether it is about lawyers or professors or smart single girls — depends on our ingrained habits of reading and perception, and ultimately confirms them as adequate to our understanding of the world around us.

— JAY MCINERNEY

True or false or neither? Is McInerney on to something here? Does literature teach us something while pedestrian fiction merely entertains us via preconceived notions about plot, etc.

I’m glad Kevin reviewed Improbable last Wednesday because I have recently emailed author Adam Fawer about becoming a writer. Fawer’s last day job was COO of About.com. I asked him if leaving that position was a big risk.

AF: It depends how you look at it. Financially, yes, I suppose it was. I was making a great living and had good job security. However, I was also spending a lot of my time laying off employees and making budget cuts, which quite frankly, I hated. In the end, I decided I’d rather take a risk and be poor and happy rather than play it safe and be rich and depressed.

After I quit, I told myself I’d start looking for a job if I didn’t have a completed manuscript and an agent within six months. Six months later, I had the former, but not the later, so I started up my job search. However, before I found a new position, I got an agent.

So, at her recommendation, I decided to rewrite my novel. Again, I put myself on a timeline. I decided that if I couldn’t finish it and get it sold within six months then I’d go back to work. At the end of the six months, I had finished it, but my agent hadn’t sold it, so I took a job. Two days later, HarperCollins bought the English rights. That was over a year and a half ago. Since then my agent has sold translation rights to my novel in six other languages.

Phil: Have you always wanted to be a writer?

Continue reading →

The Friday Review this week features Home Land released by Picador. It’s been sent back for a second printing after the novel had been rejected by two dozen major publishers. Sam Lipsyte’s Odyssey through the travails of book buying as we know it became a story as Sam was lifted from doom on the shoulders on his editors then passed to lit bloggers such as Mark Sarvas, who tracked the novel’s progress up the Amazon charts with a fervor not seen since Dick Clarke called us cats and kittens. Lizzie Skurnick aka Old Hag wrote a marvelous review in the New York Times. Home Land found its footing despite the rocky start.

Years after graduation Lewis Miner, Eastern Valley High, class of ’89 hasn’t gotten much done. Lewis has a thing for leg warmers, a fondness for sloth and a devotion to his version of Catamount Notes, the alumni newsletter. From the novel’s opening page to Lewis’ valedictory near the end Home Land is constructed around the simmering remains of high school politics and the canned prose of the alumni newsletter. Lewis and his friend Gary are as you left them after throwing your cap into the air; these guys never left, they just got older.

Tethered as he is Lewis aka Teabag addresses his Catamounts the way Cicero spoke to the Romans; he begs, he pleads, he scorches the earth. After he reconnects with his nemesis, Principal Fontana, and the leg warmer goddess, Jazz Loretta, Lewis actually realizes his desire to warn his peers of the dangers of achievement. “Don’t confuse the issue. Don’t duck the question. Don’t get preachy with the choir. Don’t mention anything, even in jest, at the airport. Don’t be born into difficult circumstances…don’t struggle with depression, don’t struggle to pay the bills.”

Teabag’s manifesto makes the entire novel worth reading; you may stumble here and there, Catamounts, after all, the main character has been banished from the mall. It would’ve been a travesty if Home Land hadn’t been published. Highly recommended.

There are many paths to developing an interest in literature, and to take that a step further, becoming a writer. Some jobs lend themsleves to reading and daydreaming provided certain preconditions exist; it’s tough to read while operating a forklift, but easy to daydream as long that big red button on the console can be mashed in with the palm of your hand.

Years ago in lower Manhattan I was employed as a claims investigator. My principal qualification for the job was foot speed; at nineteen I could outrun all the middle aged men in the department in what my supervisor called the ‘five yard dash.’ The five yard dash is what insurance investigators do when the subject of the inquiry threatens you with a heavy object; a guy threw Gravity’s Rainbow at me and I was hooked. For weeks I read this monstrous tome at my desk while typing reports on theft, vandalism, wind driven objects, suspicious fires. My supervisor would stop by and heft the book a few times a day and shake his head. “So, you’re saying this guy…attracts V-2 rockets, is that what you’re saying?”

My supervisor on White Noise. “This guys wants white noise? He should work here.”

Focaults Pendulum “The earth rotates. This is news?”

Valley of the Dolls “Good book. Maybe a great book. Get over to Queens. Somebody burned down a warehouse and we got coverage on the contents; five hundred gross of brassieres. I smell a rat.”

More anon.